The government will announce a corpus of Rs 10,000 crore towards an Electronics Development Fund this month to provide financial assistance to domestic companies, in its bid to encourage electronics manufacturing and innovation in the sector.

Launching Qualcomm’s Design in India initiative, Department of Electronics and IT (DeitY) secretary J S Deepak said the fund, housed with Canbank Venture Capital Fund, will start this month with an initial corpus of R2,500 crore and the rest will be raised from various sources.

“This fund is a fund of funds. This will fund venture capitalists, who in turn will fund domestic companies in the field of electronics system design and manufacturing… We will soon start the Electronics Development Fund (EDF), which I hope will very soon have a corpus of R10,000 crore. The Cabinet has already approved it,” he said.

“It will be used to encourage innovation and support entrepreneurship. We need to change present system of electronics manufacturing. It has to be rich in domestic Intellectual Property Rights,” added Deepak.

At the event, Qualcomm India vice-president Sunil Lalvani announced the launch of its design in India initiative to support the government’s ‘Make in India’ vision. Qualcomm has tied up with IT industry body Nasscom for its ‘Design in India’ initiative, which will largely be for hardware components rather than software, for which it is largely known.

Lalvani said the company creating a product under the Design in India programme will own intellectual property rights (IPR). “We only want to boost the ecosystem for electronics design and commercialisation of innovative products,” Qualcomm India president Sunil Lalvani said.

Parag Kar, vice-president (government affairs), Qualcomm India said a Qualcomm Innovation Lab has been set up at Bangalore to incubate shortlisted Indian companies with dedicated technical and engineering support for hardware design and development. “At least 10 companies shortlisted will be eligible for funding of up to Rs 6.5 lakh each to enable them to translate ideas to working prototypes. Up to three winning companies will receive up to Rs 65 lakh each as recognition and encouragement for future efforts,” he added.

Nasscom president R Chandrashekhar said India has strength in IT and that strength also includes design, engineering and R&D. “Engineering export from India was around $18.1 billion in 2014-15. This is the fastest-growing segment within IT industry. This is expected to reach $40 billion by 2020. Design is something that you do before developing product. IT is not delinked from manufacturing”.

Booster shot
* The government will announce a corpus of R10,000 crore towards an Electronics Development Fund (EDF) this month to provide financial assistance to domestic companies, in its bid to encourage electronics manufacturing and innovation in the sector
* The fund, housed with Canbank Venture Capital Fund, will start this month with an initial corpus of R2,500 crore and the rest will be raised from various sources, said DeitY secretary J S Deepak